ASIFA-Hollywood Hands Out Inaugural Annie Awards For Editing

Editors were celebrating at the Annie Awards on Saturday, as the International Animated Films Society (ASIFA-Hollywood) established new categories this year for feature editing and TV editing.

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Receiving the inaugural Annie Awards for editing were Craig Wood, whose work on Rango topped the feature category; and Ted Machold, Jeff Adams, Doug Tiano and Bob Tomlin, who won the TV category on the strength of their work on The Penguins of Madagascar.

I’m honored to be the first editor to receive this,” said Wood as he accepted the award for feature editing and thanked ASIFA-Hollywood for recognizing editors.

American Cinema Editors—which has been encouraging various awards programs to add editing as a category—the Editors Guild, DWA and Sony Pictures Animation had met with ASIFA-Hollywood this past year to highlight the contributions of the editor and to encourage the addition of the categories.

“The editor is the core of the feature animation process,” said Oscar nominee Chris Miller, director of DreamWorks Animation’s Puss in Boots, who was thrilled to see the editing category debut at the Annies. “Making an animated film, you are working visually, that is how you are developing the story. The editor is keeping that together. Everything flows through the editor.”

During the Annies, the editors also discussed their films with THR.

“When I met with Chris Miller for the first time, he asked me to start looking at classic (Westerns). We wanted to give (Puss) his own style, that was different from the Shrek films,” said editor Eric Dapkewicz, who was nominated for cutting Puss in Boots. “A lot of the pacing came from watching Sergio Leone movies, Clint Eastwood films. We wanted it to have its own tone, as if (Puss) is an iconic character in a Western. … (For instance), we have the long shot of him coming into a bar, Clint Eastwood style.”

Of his work, Wood said, “One of the things that particularly excited me about Rango was the possibility of making it as much like a live action film that was photographed as possible, creating the imperfections—the found moments—that a live action film takes for granted. That is what we tried to do with Rango.”

Rango and Puss in Boots are both nominated for the Academy Award for best animated feature.